The Daily Crunch 08/09/16

Is Moments what takes Twitter mainstream, and who can help Finn from Star Wars make time for what's really important – Pokemon Go? All that and more in The Daily Crunch for August 9, 2016. And before you print this out and send it to a friend via drone, ask yourself: Is it worth the risk?

1. You and Twitter might have a bit of a Moment soon

Listen, I like Twitter. I really do. But in terms of accomplishing its goal of reaching new, more mainstream users, I question some of its choices. Like Moments, which I suppose is a decent way of threading together a collection of tweets as a consumption device, but which is probably only going to generate additional confusion about what exactly Twitter is as a tool open to everyone. My advice? Refine Moments until it's more consumer friendly (two or three iterations from now), then do a broad push.

2. Tilt encroaches on Venmo's well-trodden territory

I can now pay you back for that dinner you once bought me: Tilt offers one-to-one payments between users now. The startup, née Crowdtilt, generally focuses on providing a crowdfunding platform for low-key things like parties among friends, but now it's making one-to-one available, just like Venmo and PayPal. But what Tilt does that those don't is offer significant international support. Tilt's P2P feature is available in Canada, for instance, which is something I'm going to celebrate by clearing friendly debts.

3. Another Old Internet colossus finds humble exit

Another one bites the dust. Or rather, another classic internet company accepts a less than stellar payday and quietly gets subsumed inside of a larger company with less brand prestige. Today's lucky winner is Monster, the job search platform once synonymous with finding work online. Monster's buyer is Randstad Holdings, and you just know any company with Holdings in its name is a thrill-a-minute cutting edge player.

4. Gov's git repo equivalent comes closer

The White House has released its "Federal Source Code" policy guidelines, to help government agencies share code for greater efficiency as a technical power. And the public benefits, too – 20 percent of all custom code created by gov orgs will be made open source, which will eventually find its way to Code.gov, the official home for government open source code, which will be going live in the next few months.

5. GM expands public road self-driving car tests

GM is using its Cruise acquisition to do more real-world autonomous car testing. Cruise-powered Bolt EVs will now be hitting the streets in Arizona, as well as in SF, where the pilot project began. This will hopefully help speed along the development of its autonomous taxi program with Lyft, which the two companies are hoping to start testing sometime in 2017.

6. Finn from Star Wars is only a level 5 Pokemon trainer

John Boyega, the breakout star of Star Wars, has Pokemon Go and is a level 5 trainer. That's terrible, but he says "CP levels are looking good" for his 'mons at least. Boyega spoke to TC's Devin Coldewey at Microsoft's Imagine Cup youth tech challenge, where the star revealed that while he's no programmer himself, he has a lot of interest in tech and its potential to help out in remote communities.

7. Is that drone delivery really worth it?

Cost/benefit analysis is a key ingredient in any logistics operation, and a new startup out of the UK is looking to help deliver risk assessment for drone flights. That could help a lot once drone deliveries become part of your shipping options, or as something to consider when trying to insure your remote robots.